Ending useless endnotes

[yendi]

I'm reading David Graeber's generally excellent* The Utopia of Rules, and it's reminded me of a pet peeve of mine with much of the publishing industry.

Folks, I do not give a flying fuck what your style guide, your academic advisor, or anyone else says. If you have notes appended to the text that are digressions, additive text, anecdotes, or anything other than basic bibliographic information, they should be fucking footnotes. Period. Maybe, if you've got really short chapters, you can get away with using end-of-chapter notes. But fucking endnotes? Fuck that shit. Your work of pop academia is not a fucking Choose Your Own Adventure, and my reading experience should not include keeping my finger inserted between pages 234-235 so I can flip back and forth every time you want to make an aside.

I realize this is likely a publisher issue as much as anything else (and probably not the author's fault), but it is so fucking annoying. Usability is a concept that applies everywhere, not just in technology (where, incidentally, this is less of an issue generally, since services like Kindle can handle moving between notes and text gracefully).

*Although anyone who writes "ATM Machine" repeatedly deserves a solid whack with an LCD display.

Comments

[ron_newman]

Sometimes the endnotes are sufficiently voluminous that they would take up 1/3 or 1/2 or even more of a page if they were footnotes. I'm not sure that's a good idea.

[yendi]

I've seen such notes broken up over two pages before, which might work. Of course, often, the notes are really asides that would work fine in a parenthetical paragraph in the text, anyway.

[laurion]

I seem to recall one Terry Pratchett novel where the footnote had a footnote, and combined, the footnotes took most of the page.

I'm rather enjoying the kindle ebook convention of presenting the foot/end notes as a pop up when I press on the superscripted reference.

[allah-sulu.livejournal.com]

I'm enjoying that on the Kindle now as well... but it was not always like that.

[yendi]

*nod* I still prefer paper books, much as I love my Paperwhite, but the fact that Kindles have that feature should be a sign to book publishers that their method is broken.

And yeah, I have a similar Pratchett memory (although it could certainly have been Adams, or Diaz, or someone else entirely).

Soo...

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

note a fan of of Leaves' style, I take it?

Re: Soo...

[yendi]

HoL is a little different, since it's very thoughtful about its form in a way that too many nonfiction books aren't.

Re: Soo...

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

Ah, I missed that you were aiming for nonfiction.